Verizon has admitted its cloud services will go offline for as long as 48 hours next weekend, during which time all virtual machines hosted there will be unavailable.

Verizon’s Cloud Client Care page neglects to mention the scheduled updates, which are supposedly unavoidable to enable new, unnamed improvements to the service, but the company has apparently confirmed the news in statements to both GigaOM and The Register.

Not surprisingly a number of Verizon Cloud customers have been left frustrated at the outage. The prolonged downtimes comes just a few weeks after a Xen hypervisor security issue forced several well known cloud vendors, including Amazon Web Services, IBM and Rackspace, to take their services offline in order to reboot their servers. The Xen vulnerability was apparently so critical the vendors had no choice but to do so, but the outages left the cloud community somewhat miffed.

GigaOM says that while Verizon has confirmed the outage, the 48 hour time frame is likely an exagerration. It quoted a Verizon spokesperson as saying “we do these upgrades periodically, the last one being right before Thanksgiving and there was zero impact”.

But that hasn’t been enough to quell customer’s complaints on Twitter, where numerous people have suggested Verizon’s “enterprise cloud” doesn’t really deserve to be called as such. While outages do happen from time to time, enterprise customers demand a bit of flexibility and perhaps some options to keep their services available. But this time at least, it seems they’ve been given none.

Certainly, this latest episode doesn’t do much good for the image of cloud vendors, which usually like to harp on about things like “effortless upgrades”, “minimal downtime” and “agility” – just the opposite of what Verizon’s customers will experience this weekend.

photo credit: Anas Ahmad via photopin cc